'Glory of the Crusades' by Weidenkopf is an important book which corrects the Atheist-Marxist-UnEnlightenment propaganda. In revisionist history, the ever-so-educated and peaceful Moslems were tending their goats, when suddenly in 1096 and for 200 years after, hairy, smelly Barbarians from France, who did not know what a bath or a book was, set upon them, slitting their throats, raping their women, skinning their goats, squatting on vast hordes of treasures and silks. The fact that the Levant was quite impoverished, a backwater, and contained no treasures whatsoever, never enters into this myth. Europe was far ahead of 'Islam' or the cult of submission long before Muhammad invented his totalitarian moon-idol cult. This is why Islam spent 1000 years trying to conquer and subdue Europe. You don't wage Jihad from Syria to southern France against a bereft culture.

So as Weidenkopf asks, 'why did they go'? [page 21]. Why did men from Europe march 2500 miles from 1096 to 1292 to fight against Islam and reclaim Jerusalem, the city of Peace. The main reason is of course the cult of Muhammadism or Islam. The Moslem Jihad had devastated Christianity from Arabia to southern France. Millions of Christians were forcibly converted by punishing laws and regulations including taxes and second-class knave status within Moslem lands. Millions more over 400 years, were raped, enslaved, killed, or traded like meat to supply harems, armies or workers for mines and state projects. Moslems had linked up with Vikings in the White-slave trade. Christian pilgrims for 100 years leading up to the Crusades had been killed, robbed, beaten, and sold into slavery. Christian Byzantium had been largely effaced, its Christian empire desecrated and eradicated by Moslems. As the Byzantines told sundry Western Church officials and Princelings, first us, then you. Moslems were effacing the Christian faith and its superior civilization.

Weidenkopf on why did they go?

“Faith is certainly a more reasonable explanation than material gain. If material reasons had been paramount, would it not have been far easier and safer for Western warriors to stay home and fight their neighbors rather than travel 2,500 miles to a distant and completely alien land? It used to be fashionable in academic circles to attribute motivation for participating in the Crusades to second- and third-born sons who, due to the traditions of inheritance in medieval Europe, could not inherit property. Faced with a large population of marauding and landless warriors, it was said, the Church marshaled these forces and sent them to the Holy Land where they could acquire land.

This theory has been thoroughly debunked by examining the actual records of those who went on Crusade.It was not the younger but rather the first-born sons of French families who overwhelmingly participated in the First Crusade. In other words, it was the men who stood to lose everything. And indeed, participating in the Crusade was a bad investment for medieval warriors, the vast majority of whom returned (if they returned) materially poorer for the experience.”

Marxists and Atheists are never good with facts. The Crusades were an attempt to salvage the holy places of Christendom, stem the Moslem advance, safeguard Europe [Moslems after all were still slaughtering and squatting over much of Spain]; and pay a penance for sins real and imagined. To go on Crusade would cost 4 times a nobleman's annual income. Land was mortgaged, property given to the Church for safekeeping, and taxes employed to pay for the costly ordeal. It was a ruinously expensive project, no one in Normandy or anywhere else, became 'rich' from the Crusades. Many were ruined, most would die.

Greed you say? Weidenkopf:

“We know, too, that most of those who survived the expedition and made it to the Holy Sepulchre returned home afterward; they did not stay to acquire feudal land holdings. The Crusade was a pilgrimage, and just like modern-day pilgrims who visit a shrine or church for a period of time and then return home, so did the warriors of the Crusades. After the First Crusade, there were some nobles who stayed in the Holy Land and created what are known as the Crusader States, but these areas always suffered from a lack of military manpower because of the very episodic nature of Crusading and the desire of most warrior-pilgrims to return home.”

Christians controlled large areas of the Holy Lands for 200 years. A deficit of manpower, money and interest doomed the enterprise. No wealth was made or taken, for there was none there to make or take. The enterprise was not a Marxist-colonial attack; nor was it due to 'greed' of the 'landless nobility'. The Crusades relegated much of the elite to penury and killed many of its best young talent. Fitting Marxist-Atheist or Hollywood themes onto such a complicated, granular and faith-based movement is about as intelligent as most pop-culture propaganda issued forth today – that is to say - it is utter nonsense.